Today, the sturm und drang from this pyrrhic political season will hopefully subside. It’s a good day for a stroll in Washington Park.
That is my park, or so I thought and dreamed when I was just a tyke.
You can take that walk in a new book by South Side photographer Rose Blouin, “To Washington Park, With Love.” Released recently by Haymarket Books, it presents Blouin’s massive body of work from the summer of 1987, when she visited the park on Chicago’s South Side every weekend to shoot powerful black-and-white images of its people, places and events.
Washington Park is a palette of Black life in Chicago, a righteous and gorgeous patch of green that anchors the South Side and keeps us real.
Blouin is a self-taught photographer of documentary and fine art images and was a longtime associate professor in the English and creative writing department of Columbia College Chicago. She captured thousands of portraits that chronicled the park’s doings and delights. Arts and cultural events, parades, family celebrations, competitive sports and Chicagoans lounging and reveling in leafy respite.
Washington Park’s 372 acres stretch from South Cottage Grove Avenue to Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and between 51st and 60th streets. It has been a place of history since the 18th century. It was designed in the 1870s by famed landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who configured other famed urban parks, including Central Park in New York.
In 2004, Washington Park was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
In earlier days, the park was marred by racial tensions, such as the 1919 race riots, spurred by Black and white conflict. With racial change, Washington Park became a place of celebration, for the iconic Bud Billiken Day Parade, African Festival of the Arts and the UniverSoul Circus. The DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center sits in the park.
The park was pitched as a site for Chicago’s failed 2016 Summer Olympic bid. (It features a first-rate aquatic center). It lost out to Jackson Park in a fierce competition for the Obama Presidential Center.
The summer of 1987 was pregnant with hope for Black Chicago. The previous spring, Harold Washington was triumphantly reelected as the city’s first Black mayor, Chicago journalist and political commentator Salim Muwakkil notes in an essay for the book. In celebration, Muwakkil writes, the “denizens of Washington Park, a verdant burst of greenery on the city’s South Side, embraced Washington as the park’s namesake. At least that’s how it seemed when photographer Rose Blouin pointed her lens in their direction to chronicle summer fun.”
Blouin took nearly 3,000 photographs of that summer’s fun, but then was diverted to raising a family, her work and life.
“My negatives and contact sheets remained stored in the basement for the next thirty-two years, except for the time my basement flooded,” she recalls in the book. “It took an overnight session to dry all the contact sheets with a hair dryer, and six weeks to clean and dry all the negatives.”
After she retired from teaching, she returned to the photos. They were first shown in 2022 at a public exhibition at the University of Chicago’s Arts Incubator on East Garfield Boulevard, which led to the book.
My park. In the mid-1960s, my family lived on South 60th Street near the park. I thought I owned that park. Historians might counter that it was actually named for the nation’s first president. No matter. I am a Washington.
My regular perch in the big picture window of our apartment gave me a panoramic view of my park’s grassy expanse. There, my father taught me to ride a bicycle. There, I walked to summer day camp at the field house for swimming lessons. There, this little girl frolicked among the dandelions, watched horseback riders traverse the gritty riding paths and chased down monarch butterflies fluttering near the park’s shimmering lagoon. Washington Park was a place of solace, identity and joy, an antidote to the babel of city life.
Blouin’s lens offers it up in stunning, high relief.
There is a photo of a father, relaxed on a blanket in the grass, holding his baby girl, as her sleepy eyes look up at the camera. A lone, shirtless man stirring up dinner on a rickety barbecue grill at the side of the weedy lagoon. A joyous wedding party, all dressed in white. A gaggle of children mobbing an ice cream truck.
Her book is “all about love,” Blouin told the Hyde Park Herald in a recent interview. “I want people to see that there’s so much love in capturing what I captured, and what it shows about the Black community in Washington Park during one summer when people, by and large, were looking joyful, happy, relaxed, in community, in celebration, in creativity.”
As we push through these turbulent times to peace, a little Washington Park love can show us the way.
I’ll see you there.
Laura Washington is a political commentator and longtime Chicago journalist. Her columns appear in the Tribune each Wednesday. Write to her at LauraLauraWashington@gmail.com.
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